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an incensey ashram to make everything right again. Hit the Ganges, wash themselves clean in the filthy river.
    Matt taps his chest. It’s still there, Zane’s letter stowed in his breast pocket, scrumpled road map–fashion from a few months of folding and unfolding. An actual letter, mail with no
e
in front. Zane’s hand is ludicrously masculine, a parody of maleness—it couldn’t get any more erect without lifting right off the page. Nothing limp there, nosiree.
    Dear Matt,
    I don’t want to make a big deal out of this, but there, I already have. Maybe if I put it into words that will help me get it out of the way. Which is what words are for, isn’t it, mister kritik? To sort stuff out, pass judgment on it and put it behind you?
    Please.
    I told you last time you were in Toronto (thanks for dins btw, but you should have let me pay) that I wasn’t just HIV slash anymore. I’m AIDS. It’s a technical thing, T cell count and whatnot. For the moment I’m fine, but I’ll feel like fugging hell very shortly. On this point everyone’s exquisitely clear. They want me on the cocktail of course, but here’s the thing. I’m not doing it. I’m just not. I’m telling Nico, and Mercedes, and maybe probably my parents in a while, and nobody else.
    Oh, except you. It isn’t fair, is it? It’s asking too much. Maybe that’s what good friends do, they ask too much?
    And there’s more to ask, but not yet.
    Matt’s already reread the letter once since leaving home, to help kill time in the departure lounge in Vancouver.
Reread
isn’t quite right: he ran his eye over it, the way you run your eye over the lyrics of a song you’re already stuck with, the lines of a prayer that’s long since been rutted into one of the folds, one of the rumples of your brain. Not prayer exactly, but … what’s that word? Mariko was forever brandishing it during her Zen phase, got it from that Roshi guy. It starts with a
k
and it means something that promises to mean something but then doesn’t. A puzzle that possesses and then stymies you, silences your mind and makes way for … something. Some jolt of immanence, of wordless oneness.
    Koan. Koan? Koan.
    This time, in the cab, he doesn’t even bother peeking, just rewinds and replays the letter in his head.
    I can’t explain this decision but I’ll try anyway. I want to live close to the truth, Matt. The truth is the I-less world, the world minus me. Can I know this world while I’m still in it?
    And so on, another page and a half of this kind of infuriating swami-speak. Nothing about Shanumi, the Nigerian woman whose long slow drugless death he’d just finished filming. Nothing to suggest that this is in fact the oneness he craves—oneness with the whole damn suffering world. Mercy disguised as monkishness, protest disguised as spiritual surrender …
    There, right there. That feeling again, as though Jatinder’s just taken a big bump way too fast. Not a no-feeling but a feeling of nothing, of nauseating absence. An agonized weightlessness that heaves all Matt’s viscera up into the hooped barrel of his chest. This is the sensation that hits him whenever he obsesses too long and too intensely about Zane, about his loopy friend and his loopy plan. This is his body’s way of warning him off, of—
    “And here we are, sir.”
    Oh, very funny. Cabbie humour at its best. They’re still out in the burbs—a Legoland of grey concrete, the grumble of jets still audible through the cab door as it swings wide—but the portico at which Jatinder’s just pulled up couldn’t get any swankier. Matt glances about, half expecting red carpet, the clamour of paparazzi. A minute later he’s being bellboyed into the hotel’s hushed lobby, having bid Jat a contrite adieu and pressed on him an extra twenty, about half the cash left in his wallet.
    Jeezuz aitch. Acres of marble, royalty-ready wing chairs, sprays of big-stamened blossoms, this place is the
definition
of crazy. Matt knows he